There is an emerging class of advanced systems that on top of accepting concrete user commands can also accept a problem description and determine an appropriate action based on the context and further interaction with the user. Such problem-solving systems will need to handle many challenges to provide valuable results. One functional aspect such systems will need to address in order to provide valuable results is the actual mapping from the problem space to the action space. For example, in the place-of-interest (POI) domain, hierarchical taxonomies (or ontologies) of concepts may exist that arc useful when searching for relevant POIs. More generally, these information sources can be viewed as tools that can be utilized to propose possible solutions to problems expressed by a user. These taxonomies are often developed and run by large volunteer communities but may also be proprietary sources of information.
However, these sources of information might not exhaustively provide the information and relations to provide possible solutions to the broad types of questions posed by respective users. For more complex tasks, mappings from one hierarchical structure to another may be employed to obtain possible solutions to relatively more complex problems. Each of the hierarchical structures may describe different types of entities. Such data structures, however, may be maintained by different organizations and different editors, which may result in inconsistencies in the level of detail of the information. Common issues may include the incompatibility of such structures in terms of the names of identifiers used, the differing depths or granularities of classification of the information, and the extent to which a mapping covers the hierarchical structures.
Therefore, improvements to systems that provide possible solutions to problems posed by a user are needed.